The embodiment relates to a data generating technology for electron beam lithography.
A lithography process as one of LSI manufacturing processes generally involves using a light exposure in a mass production process of producing a large quantity of semiconductor devices. There is, however, a case of manufacturing a small quantity of semiconductor devices and semiconductor circuits before conducting the mass production based on the light exposure. A purpose thereof is to manufacture an engineering sample (ES) or to implement a macro test and a chip test on silicon. There is recognized effectiveness of utilizing an electron beam exposure for reducing a labor, a period of time and a cost for manufacturing reticles in order to manufacture a small quantity of products.
A reason thereof lies in an increase in the number of elemental devices included in one semiconductor device and a rise in degree of difficulty of manufacturing the reticle needed for exposing the semiconductor device due to an ultra deep-submicron process of the semiconductor device over the recent years. The rise in degree of the manufacturing difficulty becomes a load on manufacturing the reticle and brings about a cost-up and an increase in the manufacturing period. This type of reticle manufacturing load might suppress profits in business of the semiconductor devices or might become one of factors that affect a delivery period.
In manufacturing a large quantity of products, because of high productivity, it is valuable to employ a light exposure technology of performing an exposure by reticle pattern projection. On the other hand, this reticle load is not allowable to a small quantity of products. Therefore, for the small quantity of products, the load on manufacturing the reticle can be avoided by utilizing the electron beam exposure by which to implement the direct exposure over the semiconductor substrate with no intermediary of the reticle.
The technologies described above have such a problem that the finished shapes do not get coincident in the light exposure and in the electron beam exposure. It is an object of the present invention to generate such a piece of exposure data for the electron beam exposure that the shape based on the electron beam exposure gets coincident with or approximate to the finished shape when making the mass production, i.e., the shape processed based on the light exposure.